India & New Orleans

OHMAN here we go I seem to remember almost everything! I guess the key is to wake up a few times in the night. In maybe chronological order:

First I was in India, traveling with someone but I don’t think I ever realized who. Having never been to India IRL, it looked a lot like the northeast US and Switzerland except the architecture looked different. We toured around on a bus for a while, I in wide-eyed wonder looking all around, and then we rode eastward up this ramp into a black-and-white stone temple that just kept going higher and higher! We were riding up a mountain, but continued to go through higher and higher levels of the façade of this temple. Eventually we emerged (and I saw this 3rd-person from above) up on a rocky/snowy mountain ridge, and the spot we came to turned out to be the very spot where the Kinks (not the actual Kinks, more like a four-person version of Eurythmics) made that seminal music video in the early 80s! (Disclaimer: this reference has exactly zero basis in reality and I am quite mystified as to where it came from.) I was totally excited!

Possibly in the same setting or maybe later or earlier, I was travelling with a large group of people and we were apparently all staying at a hotel; it was run by the people who IRL run one of the hotels I stayed at in Switzerland last summer, and here they spoke Italian with each other but German with me. I was the first person to arrive for breakfast in the morning, and they had prepared for me a coffee or cocoa or something as well as a dish of roasted onions in a creamy base with browned cheese on top. De-licious. After that, possibly after the bus ride up to Kinks Mountain, it was evening at the hotel and everyone was there at a get-together in the downstairs eating area and there was lots of food about, possibly a potluck. I remember going outside the hotel to the Subaru, whose trunk was open, and maybe eating out there momentarily, but that’s a vague memory.

Later my parents and I were in New Orleans. It was completely not RL New Orleans though; there was no hurricane damage and it was a very small (probably less than 1 half-mile by 1 quarter-mile), dense, Mediterranean-looking city along the banks of a river or pond or something lying the east. There was a street called Thigh St (!. ??) kind of slanching along through the center of town and then an intersecting street that went right down to the water (let’s call it Water St). The merchants on the part of Thigh St to the north of Water St were “mostly douchebags” and to be avoided, as annotated on a map of the town. The city was built on a former farm property; the farmhouse was still there and at the water’s edge just north of Water St, while the barn was on a peninsula or island across the water from the city and was connected by a bridge to the farmhouse. My dad and I were able to watch a live simulation of how the city had built up from the farm – i.e. we were right in the middle of the action and could see it as it actually happened. It started out with the farmhouse (which had a courtyard open to the street) and barn, which seemed to be aluminum-clad all over, and then some smaller buildings got built in the farmhouse courtyard, and then the tall stucco buildings went up right around the farmhouse, which is what made it look urban, and eventually the whole city was built.

I think I woke up right after that and then went back to sleep. I was then in a river shallow enough to stand in that was pretty much in the same place as the body of water next to New Orleans, and it flowed south and you could stand up and just be pulled along by the current. I was with Lisetta and some Williams personnel including the chaplain and was showing them the New Orleans map (I thought this was a metadream – that I was telling them about dreaming about New Orleans being like this – but it may actually not have been, because the weather and time were the same – fresh, clear, and warm, sun high in the east). The river sloped down quite a bit at one stretch and we rode down it, still standing, like an escalator. Later, upstream from there, there was a partly-submerged limestone cave with lots of large widely-separated seaweeds in the water and hanging from the walls. It was strongly lit by the sunlight shining at the entrance of the cave, and I think maybe the cave emptied into the river. Anyway, Lisetta and I and maybe some other people were sitting at the edge of the water in the cave looking around.

The final thing I remember, which may have been interspersed with the above, is that I was running and later walking along a railroad trail in the woods with a bunch of people from my high school XC days, and eventually we emerged onto Rt 202 and continued north; here I saw other people; we ran by Steve Melis, for instance. That’s all.